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guess I’d want to come over and look, if I were in their place. But what had happened wasnow old news to me, and the thought of saying it over and over again was not one that I relished. Since my fear still hadn’t arrived, I would spend the time thinking of some good understatements to fit the occasion.
    A big official truck rolled out across the grass. GO NAVY, it said in big white letters, and on top of it was mounted a pair of loudspeakers to reinforce the words. At this point going Navy was a much sounder bet than going Air Force.
    Paul Hansen had been first to arrive, cameras around his neck, out of breath.
    “Man … I thought … you … had bought it …”
    “What do you mean?” I said. “We just touched down a little hard there. Felt like we ran into something.”
    “You don’t … know. You hit the ground, and then … went way over … on your nose. I thought you … going to nose over for sure … on your back. It was a bad … scene. I really thought… you had it.”
    He should have had his breath back by now. Was the sight of the crash so bad that it could affect him so? If anybody had a right to be concerned, it was me, because it was my airplane all bent up there in the grass.
    “Oh, no, Paul. Not a chance of going over. Did it really look that way?”
    “Yeah. I thought … my God … Dick’s bought it!”
    I didn’t believe him. It couldn’t have been that bad. But thinking back, I remembered that the first impact had been very hard, though, and the sound of that explosion. And we did nose forward then, too. But nothing like we were going over.
    “Well,” I said, after a minute, “You got to admit that’s a pretty hard act to follow.” I felt springs loosening inside me, springs that had been tight in the air, to let me feel every tiny motion of the airplane. Now they were loosening, and I felt relaxed, except that I didn’t know how long it wouldtake to fix the airplane. That was the only tense thought. I wanted to fix the plane as soon as possible.
    Thirty hours later, the biplane had been repaired, tested and was flying passengers again.
    It is kind of a miracle, I thought, and I wondered at it.
    When we left Prairie du Chien, Rio was the Unknown. And now, with Rio become Known, we felt the tug of security, and were uneasy.
    The wind came up that afternoon and it changed Stu MacPherson at once from parachute jumper to a groundling ticket-seller.
    “It’s about fifteen miles an hour now,” he said, worried. “That’s a bit too much for me to feel good about jumping.”
    “Aw, c’mon,” I said, wondering how powerful a wind could be on the big silken dome. “Fifteen crummy miles an hour? That can’t hurt you.” It would be fun to know, too, whether Stu could be bullied out of his better judgment.
    “That’s getting pretty windy. I’d rather not jump.”
    “We got all these people coming out to see you. Crowd’s gonna be unhappy. Somebody said yesterday that your jump was the first ever made on this field. Now everybody’s all set to see the second. You better jump.” If he gave in, I had a lecture all prepared on how only weaklings give in to what they know isn’t right.
    “Fifteen miles is a lot of wind, Dick,” Paul said from the hangar. “Tell you what. We have to test the canopy out, make sure that the inversion’s gone. Why don’t you strap on the harness for us and we’ll throw the canopy up into the wind and see that it opens out all right.”
    “I’ll strap on your parachute,” I said. “I’m not afraid of your parachute.”
    Paul brought the harness over and helped me strap into it, and as he did, I remembered the stories I had heard in theAir Force of pilots dragged about helplessly by parachutes in the wind. I began, in short, to have second thoughts.
    But by that time I was strapped in, my back to the wind, which seemed to be blowing much harder now, and Paul and Stu were down by the canopy laid on the grass, ready to throw it up into the